Honestly, I like it when you do black and white, and then add color the next day. I can’t seem to stop coming back Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, vainly hoping youu’ll have posted another strip. Having it at least slightly different is the next closest thing.

Reminds me of another comic, possibly WoW Eh?, where the artist started posting the comic in black and white first then color it the next day. I think a couple of fans just wanted the black and white version so they could color it themselves.

I have just been victim of a social drama, and my biggest regret is that it spilled over onto a friend who has already had a very bad week; death of a friend, fighting illness, her partner being attacked.
And because of a misinterpretation, she’s getting more grief because of me.

While not quite as askew as I was worried, panel 4 does indeed confirm that the parents’ attitude is quite askew indeed. Of course he knows to follow what you say, and THAT DOESN’T TRANSLATE TO GENERAL RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY IT TRANSLATES TO “NOBODY ELSE IS MY PARENTS SO I DON’T HAVE TO LISTEN TO ANYONE ELSE”. YOU IDIOTS ARE SO EDUCATED YOU HAVE NO ROOM IN YOUR HEADS TO REMEMBER HOW CHILDREN ACTUALLY THINK.

Sorry, sorry. While not quite the people I was worried they were, they’re still people I’ve met before so many times. They have no excuse. They were children once. But they don’t remember. They have forgotten how children see rules and authority as abstract, arbitrary and often downright nonsensical. They expect their son to be born having absorbed all of their learning from the start, completely ignoring his need to learn everything from scratch, especially basic things like how to treat others that are less able to “make him” behave.

I do so hope Selkie has the presence of mind to bring up the “make me” line. I hope, I hope, I hope. It’s the one thing that will plausibly illustrate to these numbskulls their son’s real attitude as opposed to the attitude they imagine he has.

I’m just a bit afraid that if Selkie attacks them right now the parents will think that Truck wasn’t as violent as he really was. After all, she’s still healthy enough to attempt to claw our faces off, right?

No, you’re not seeing things. Todd right now is sort of a half-way point between “old” and “new”. I wanted to keep the more defined facial structures, but dial back how pronounced the chin and cheekbones were. The redesign was bugging me because he just didn’t quuuiiiiite look like “Todd” anymore. I think this is a good mix of the two.

My mom never raised me not to pick fights. Her own words were “Son, I’d rather you not pick fights, I’d rather you not throw the first punch. But if you gotta, you gotta. Just, get the job done.”

Even with those words, she taught me something that the little jerk needs to learn, when you’re tall, muscular, fat, whatever, when you’re a larger person, you need more space, which means you need to not step on the little people. It requires self-control and knowing your surroundings.

And that’s been a more valuable lesson to me than whether or not you should pick a fight.

The problem of the martial artists being terrible in no rules fighting is that most of them have trouble translating the difference between a no holds barred fight and a competition. A fight and a competition have different tactics entirely and different moves work differently obviously.

What happens here is that the martial artist stuck in the mindset of his techniques misses that all you need is to punch, punch, and if that fails, more punch and they bring out all the fancy moves they learned to tragic consequences.

Martial Arts that’s based on self defense (We were STRICTLY prohibited to start fights using our techniques on the streets) they teach you to anticipate blows and learn how to deflect 90% of them, no matter which “style” was used: for every possible angle we had 4 standard deflections.

Problem is indeed with *SOME* martial artists that are crying because “The assailant didn’t punch us the way I learnt to deflect” which is bullcrap: you just need to recognise some similarities in order to successfully block and/or deflect a punch or kick.

I don’t agree with most of what Professor Trunchbull is saying, but I do agree with one thing: that boys shouldn’t pick fights with girls. I’m not saying it to be sexist (hell, I AM a girl) but it’s true. There’s a kid I’ve known since kindergarten, and him and I never really got along when we were young. He had a lot of problems, medical and personal, so for whatever reason he tended to lie a lot. One day I got sick of hearing them all and broke off with him. When we started high school, we made amends because my brothers had befriended him and started to teach him how to play guitar and the drums.

Honestly, he is not the friendliest-looking guy in the world. He needed surgery on his head when he was a baby, and on top of that he was born prematurely. But he is a very, very friendly guy nowadays and he’s grown up quite a bit. Of course, looking the way he did he attracted a lot of unwanted attention. Kids would pick on him, bug him, and kids that were teacher’s pets would bully him in front of the teachers, and the teachers would do nothing because they didn’t like him. One day, the kids in his band class decided to completely batter the brand-new, very expensive trumpet that his grandfather had given him. He went off the deep end and kicked their asses after band when they mocked him and attacked him, and the teacher still sided with them, and so did the dean and the headmaster (because they didn’t know the whole story). His dad didn’t take any of that shit, though. He was PO’ed that he was called out of work to hear that his son was getting punished for defending himself after his property had been beaten to sh*t, and that the kids who did it were getting off scot-free. To make matters worse, the grandfather who had bought him the trumpet as a present died not long after all this happened.

He may have gotten into trouble a lot, but it was always for all the wrong reasons.

A few months ago, he even told me that his father told him from a very young age that he should never lay his hands on a woman in anger. So while most of the teachers had always defined him as a troublemaker, he never picked on girls, he never fought with girls, he never laid a hand on them. Not even me when we didn’t get along. He wasn’t an instigator.

His dad isn’t wrong, either. Teaching a boy from a young age that it’s never okay to hit a girl is a positive thing. If they learn that it’s wrong at a young age, they’ll be less likely to pick a fight with a girl (of course, a girl picking a fight with them is definitely a different story) and less likely to ever lay a hand on a woman in anger.

My father and brothers have never laid a hand on a woman in anger. Neither has our friend.

The Professor’s wording is a little snooty, but I do believe that boys ought not to pick fights with girls.

Hell, when I got in trouble three times for being in a fight, I was always the instigator because of the verbal mocking that occurred beforehand. And I’m a girl. Twice did the boys fight me back, once the boy did not fight me back.

I read what you had to say and while I agree with most of what you’ve said, I don’t agree with all of it.

In this current day and age, women demand the same kind of respect men get, they want to be treated fairly, they want to be paid fairly, they want everything a male might get in the real world.

Except they don’t, not really. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into a woman who expects special behavior because of their gender and that’s just bullshit.

You want to be treated like a princess? You want to be taken care of? You want those special privileges like being overlooked when there is heavy work to do, that’s fine. But you don’t ask for that while demanding the same sort of treatment men get.

Then there is the entire way of how some (most?) women act these days. You see these women acting totally inappropriately, the way they dress, the way they act and honestly a lot of times it’s totally disgraceful to their gender. But hey, they are ladies right?

For all that matters, in my book chivalry is dead and women are the ones who killed it. Girls aren’t sacred, why would they be? Because they can give birth? A lot of good it’s done them since some of them treat it like a disposable resource.

Women want to be treated equally? That’s fine in my books, but they are going to be treated equally in ALL aspects, weather it be at work, social interactions or even fighting. Girls ought not to pick fights with boys and a lot of the situations I’ve seen, they pick fights with boys, because they know exactly what society thinks on the matter.

My aunt was a vicious abuser to my uncle. One day while in a heated argument my uncle just decided to call the cops, you know what my aunt’s response was? hitting herself in the face with a bottle and having him arrested. She later went on to twisting his testicles so hard and tightly he ended up in the hospital for 3 days. They eventually divorced. I would have murdered her.

It’s perfectly okay to defend yourself, it’s perfectly okay to react negatively in a way when someone is aggravating you or pissing you off.

I’ve already popped a girl in the face before because she was up in my face and screaming her lungs out and I never met her before, ever. And I don’t feel bad about it, hopefully the dumb bitch learned a lesson, women aren’t above anything.

My mom never taught me never to hit a girl. In fact she told me the opposite, that if I was being threatened, take her down.

It might have had something to do with the fact that she is 6 feet, 2 inches of muscle and gristle. She worked at a bar as a bartender and waitress with her favorite response to overly friendly customers was to grab them by the back of their neckhairs, hit them face first with the door, make THEM open it, and toss them out. Needless to say, this was not a woman that believed in the “weak girl” stereotype.

She always made it clear that I was not to hit a woman for no reason, but that went towards the men around me as well. She believed that to not treat a hostile woman as a proper threat was a great way to have a knife put in my back. I don’t believe that Chivalry is dead. There is a time for Chivalry and acting like a knight in shining armor. But just like knights weren’t really all that chivalrous, there’s a time to put the Ms Manners attitude behind you, pop the claws and go to town.

One doesn’t need to hit a hostile female to defend oneself. I can easily disarm anyone who tries to attack me without even touching them, and I’m a cripple. The best option, when being attacked, is to find a way to unbalance your opponent, then just get out of there. If you attack in return, then you are just as bad as the original attacker. If your out in the streets and your jumped, if you defend yourself and the attacker comes out worse you get penalized by the police because of it, its like manslaughter laws.

Anyone who threatens me, I will put them in their place, one way or another, no matter their gender, their age (within reason, I can’t see hitting children), their ethnicity or religion.

Fighting is wrong. Period. I have always said that, but if you don’t defend yourself, if you don’t have the balls to do what you need to do, then those people who act like that will never learn a lesson.

I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again as the matter calls for.

I shouldn’t say chivalry is dead, per-say, because I still go out of my way told hold doors open, pull out chairs and that sort of thing, but I don’t buy into the whole double standard for females. Never have. And I have never bought into the “you never hit a woman. EVER.”.

I don’t really know what you are talking about Lycos, with this whole “like manslaughter law”, because here in Wisconsin, if someone trespasses on your private property and you shoot them, it’s perfectly fine. At least that’s the way it is in Marinette County.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t get in all that many fights. I usually find against a belligerent person, a little intimidation pretty much ends a fight before it begins. Most people actively avoid fights, and if they can get riled up into fighting, they can just as easily be convinced not to fight. The best weapon isn’t in the fist or the foot. It’s in the mind.

I get what you’re saying and I actually agree with a majority of what you’re saying. Too often I’ve seen so-called feminist rant about equality and misogyny but turn around and expect special treatment, not all but I’ve seen my fair share of it that it ruins the idea of feminism for me.

But I don’t want to turn this into a feminist thing. Just stating that one fact.

There are a lot of women who would love equality but sadly they are forced into that sheltered privileged position by both genders.

If a guy comes up to me yelling in my face and strikes me I’m going to hit back. The same goes for a female. And if the roles were reversed I highly expect to get hit back. Like it or not sometimes genders are lost in the eye of those who are in a heated moment, all they see are people and are down to the instinct of fight or flight.

That having been the point that I wanted others to pay attention to, but alas, is the one that has been overlooked. >.< Probably should have started out with it. Truck's behaviour is alarming and his parents are overlooking it. Being so angry and violent at a young age can shed light on what his future will be like if they don't pay attention to the fact that their child is not an angel, he is not a saint that can do no wrong. He could turn out to be an @$$hole worse than the kids who battered our friend's trumpet and got off scot-free on it when they were the ones who instigated the attack.

I think the boy needs to learn about being a large man. Learning about your size you learn a great many things about interacting with the people around you. There’s no doubt he’s a large child and if he wasn’t hyper aggressive he would get made fun of. He needs to learn that he needs a lot of space to work with, which he probably understands by now, but a refresher is due. He also needs to understand what that means, cause and effect. And most importantly, you do not pick up a little girl and shake her half to death just because she resists you. This is a very dangerous precedent and suggests dangerous behavior later in life if he doesn’t learn cause and effect now.

For instance, I’m 6’4″ 327 pounds. When I was a child and we played WWF, I would always get tagged as Andre the Giant. Yet when I was younger, for some reason, I thought I was undersized and I would bump into things, run them over without truly understanding the damage I was doing. Now, if I had realized this and turned violent, I would have wound up probably in Juvie. It would not have been fun at all. I’ve never shaken a girl half to death, but I would have been little better than a raving beast. Which ole Truck is slowly turning into.

Now on the plus side, Truck may not turn into a little jerk, or an entitled fratboy that I love taking the mickey out of. He could look back on his actions and feel embarrassed about them. Heck, he could even turn into a tibetan monk, even on his own. Or, he could turn into a Hells Angel. Either one is possible. But he needs instruction so there’s less chance of the second.

It’s hard to focus on the rest when you introduced your point and ended it with it not being okay to hit females. The story you told applies to school bullying but didn’t really apply to the point that you were making until the end which was starting to enter into the tl;dr territory.

But still that didn’t really hit the point of domestic abuse like Dave had said. Honestly I didn’t even pick that up at all. All I got was don’t ever hit girls period, if they are instigating it’s iffy but still don’t touch them.

It may or may not have been what you meant to say but that’s sort of how it comes off to some.

When it comes to the highly educated and high-IQ people, most of them lack a serious knack for “sublte” hints and general people-skills.
Sarcasm is also a big blind spot in their brains.. they simply don’t recognize it. (People with High-IQ, and thus: usually autistic)
Studies have shown that people with exceptionally high IQ have a (very) low EQ.

The don’t-hit-girls thing is a tough one. I am female, and very much a tomboy, and was given a lot of crap for wanting to do things the boys did. I never asked for special treatment for being a girl – even when I was the first female dishwasher in the restaurant, I did not ask for help lifting heavy things, and if I was too short, I got a damn stool.

I was beaten up by boys who wanted a ball I had – one of them picked me up, swung me around, trying to make me sick and scared. I bit him. Principal’s response was “I’d have bitten you too!” (Different times.) Later, I was beaten up by girls because I said, when asked, rather foolishly, that no, I didn’t think a girl who’d been picking on me was nice.

Don’t hit people at all is a better sentiment. Don’t pick fights. Defend yourself if attacked. Understand that male or female, someone can hurt you badly. I was terrified to fight back for the most part, afraid I’d get in trouble. In retrospect, I might as well have. Maybe it would have made them stop, I don’t know.

My poor brother was raised with the don’t-hit-girls thing, and in 4th grade the girls constantly tormented and hurt him – kicked him in the nuts, things like that – and his man-hating teacher allowed it.

Males and females are different, even in the way we learn, and it’s fascinating. But that does not mean that women should get special treatment, nor that it is okay to bar a woman without seeing if she CAN do the job. I come back to this opening of the combat roles to women in the military. GREAT. But. But if they want to be a Ranger or a SEAL or whatever, don’t lower the physical standards. If the job requires you lift 150 pounds and run with it, you need to be able to do that job. If it doesn’t, if the bar is unreasonable, then lower it for male and female alike.

I know that feeling. I was a tomboy too, I rough housed when I was younger and got into fights (I swear I didn’t instigate them) and was beaten up a few times when I was told not to fight in school. But I was strong and loved proving it, I guess towing fifty pounds of school material in my backpack 5 days a week helped.

Once I started working I was the type to get things myself in the places where I worked including the heavy boxes. My bosses would always get after me telling me to get one of the guys to do it which was insulting to me for two reasons 1. I believed in not being lazy and getting things yourself if you’re able. 2. Don’t think I’m weak because I’m female.
Besides when I applied for the job it was a requirement that we’d be able to lift a certain amount of weight on our own.